As the World Wide Web moves into the Web 2.0 era, online communities created for sharing information, media, and other user-generated content have become popular. End users may now have access to many tools and technologies that creatively categorize user-generated content. User-generated content, which may be anything from files and data to movies and media, may be categorized and shared with others through folksonomy or social classification.
Social classification, which may refer to “tagging content,” may facilitate content organization in a way that is not available from traditional content organization systems. In order to tag content, such as a file, an end user may create one or more tags and associate the tags with the file. Current tagging techniques may allow for tagging photos, music, movies, blogs, feeds, files, documents, and many other types of content. For example, an end user may wish to tag a vacation photo as “sunny, vacation, Bob, Michelle, Hawaii.” The end user may find the photo searching by tags, as opposed to searching by file location. If the end user performed a tag search for Bob, all photos including the tag “Bob” may be located.
Tagging systems may provide various categorization and search capabilities. For example, some systems may allow users to search content by one tag at a time, while other systems may allow users to search by multiple tags. Some systems may even provide “tag clouds,” which are visual representations of tags used on a website. Such systems may help users find and organize content.
Although tagging systems may provide various advantages over subject indexing or other traditional organizational schemes, most tagging systems offer only limited content control. For example, tagging systems may only allow particular types of content to be tagged. Also, users may typically rely on traditional security measures, which provide security at the file or folder level, to protect their tagged content. Traditional tagging systems may also fail to take advantage of the unique nature of tagging to provide efficient sharing of tagged content. Users may benefit from tagging systems and methods that take advantage of the unique nature of tagging to provide more efficient and effective content management.